Free Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher Page B

as he never failed to be by those violent shifts of neighborhood which succeeded one another without warning everywhere in the city. Instruction lurked these streets, and in the end, evaded.
    As he walked into his own building, he turned down the collar of his coat. The place was a decorator’s cave, so effectively contrived to deny the elements that not to cooperate seemed coarse. Like the apartment upstairs, to which Bee gave so much concentration, it made cunning use of all the sensuous affirmations of safety. In front of the elevator, which was actually self-service, a uniformed attendant lounged nevertheless, reduced to the level of that accessory given to people who had everything. Above the man’s head a SHELTER sign pointed, like a rude thumb.
    He let himself into the apartment. In the long living room whose every possession schemed toward its perfect one—a casement framing Central Park—a few lamps glowed, but not too many, and the table in the bay held a plate of sandwiches, glasses, a decanter, a bottle of beer and an opener, as if Bee were saying to him: “This is my talent…don’t despise it…don’t be angry.” Long draperies, in a nervous pattern of darts and runs that he had once dubbed “thrills and chills,” and thereafter always referred to thus, had been slid across the window. People like themselves had so many pet names for things, so many terrible mutual coynesses. He pulled the draperies back. There it was—the diorama that never switched off. As he took off his coat, still looking at it, the hem caught the beer bottle, which slipped to the rug unbroken. Bending to pick it up from the soft pile, he saw that the bedroom door was open a crack, shedding light into the hall off the far end of the room.
    “Bee. Come on in here.”
    She came in, almost at once. With her, to be caught disheveled was to be caught out; even when ill, she managed it with patient artistry, covering up, under a feverish flow of perfumes and bed-jackets, the less savory fevers of the body. Now, in her pink robe, she looked as if she had put their quarrel under a hot shower, and had powdered over it. She picked up his hat and coat from the sofa where he had tossed them and hung them away in the quilted closet. He watched her until she came and sat down across the table from him, as they had sat together in the oval of thousands of evenings.
    “O.K.,” he said. “Now we’re inside.”
    They sat on, in silence.
    “You going to make me do it all, Bee?” he said.
    “I want you just to see that woman,” he said. “See those kids. I’ll get her to bring both, if you want. I’ll get Parker to check them, test them.” His voice trailed off.
    “God in heaven!” he said. “It’s not usually the man …”
    She got up from the table then and leaned against the window, her back to him.
    “So it’s a risk,” he said. “Look out there. The whole world has a shelter sign on it. It always has. Some kind of a one.”
    “Bee.” He went over to her and put an arm around her. “It’s why people have kids.” He rocked her gently back and forth. “Their own gamble.”
    “But it wouldn’t be ours!” she said, and stiffened away from him. “It would never be ours!”
    His arm, still on the shape of her, dropped to his side.
    “Sit with them in the park sometime,” she said. “All those women. Like I do with Lil. They lean over the carriage and say, ‘Who does it take after?’ And I wouldn’t know.”
    In the black and gold pane, her image, vague and beveled, looked back at him. “I’d get to love it—and all the time I’d be thinking…where’s the woman who had it…who’s the father? Even if we knew.
    “Sure I’d love it,” she said, “but I’d always be watching it. Because it wasn’t mine.”
    “Turn around,” he said. “ Turn around. ”
    She turned.
    “Those lists,” he said. “All those lists!”
    She put out her hand, a short wheedling distance.
    “Suppose we’d gotten to the top